Where the action is...

When you are involved in a family event- vacation, trip, or gathering- you have a choice as to your role in the situation.

On one role you can participate. By participating you can spend time laughing, hugging, cuddling, running, riding, falling, swimming, dunking, relaxing, and whatever else is on the unspoken itinerary for enjoying yourselves. As you participate you file away the memories of the event so that later on you can say, "Remember when..." and conjure up the time frozen in your file directory of memories.

The other role is recorder. This is where you stand on the sidelines with camcorder or camera in hand recording everyone else who is participating. You capture the others laughing, hugging, cuddling, running, riding, falling, swimming, dunking, relazing, and whatever else. Then when the conversations of the future start off with "Remember when..." you can produce the images to share that go along with the memories.

Today, our first full day at the lake, I was mainly a participant. I swam, snitched 2 pieces of bacon, napped, made a trip to Wal-Mart for two forgotten items (Damon's bathing suit and eye drops for me), played with Fuller a bunch and even made dinner with D for the whole bunch. But man, there were moments where being a recorder would have been awesome.

Albert and Linda purchased a gigantic inflatable slide that goes in the lake and mocks the adults who attempt to climb the plastic pyramid and instead of sliding down the slope they end up flipping over the side and getting dunked in the cool waters. Each attempt by me, Damon, and Bob (D's brother-in-law) resulted in side splitting laughter that really should be a shoo-in for footage on America's Funniest Home Videos.

The rest of the day was mainly relaxing, which is the over all goal of any visit to Lake Martin. And as it should be, and ever will be.